Should you be at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) sometime soon, and wish to take the shuttle bus to JTC Corporation's CleanTech Park, you might find yourself in a vehicle that drives itself.

Plans call for just such an autonomous shuttle to start running the 2-km (1.2-mile) route, as a real-world test of driverless public transportation.

n a telephone press conference this morning, Elon Musk, the many-faceted founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, expanded his earlier Hyperloop reveal by announcing that he will develop and construct a Hyperloop demonstrator. He believes that a properly funded consortium would take about seven years to build a commercial Hyperloop

He may be the man behind PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, but Elon Musk has been garnering more attention lately for his proposed Hyperloop transit system. Although virtually no details had previously been announced, Musk has stated that it would serve as a much faster, more efficient alternative to traditional passenger rail transport – more specifically, it would allow passengers to travel the 350 miles (563 km) from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes. Well, this afternoon (as promised) he finally let everyone in on just what it would be, and how it would work

When people grumble about how they think the US isn’t as technologically advanced as it should be, they like to bring up bullet trains – Europe and Asia have them, so why doesn’t America? Well, it’s getting one. Work is starting this summer on a high-speed rail line running from San Francisco to Los Angeles, that will carry a passenger train traveling at over 200 mph (322 km/h).

The city of Gothenburg in Sweden is getting ready to ride into the future with a cutting-edge bus service system whose proponents hope will blaze a new trail in urban mobility. Part of a project called ElectricCity, which is slated for a 2015 launch, the electric bus will be fueled by electricity generated from renewable sources. The buses themselves will be energy-efficient, near silent and will not emit any greenhouse gases. Plans for the system also include an indoor bus stop.

In the 1800s, when pneumatic tubes shot telegrams and small items all around buildings and sometimes small cities, the future of mass transit seemed clear: we'd be firing people around through these sealed tubes at high speeds. And it turns out we've got the technology to do that today – mag-lev rail lines remove all rolling friction from the energy equation for a train, and accelerating them through a vacuum tunnel can eliminate wind resistance to the point where it's theoretically possible to reach blistering speeds over 4,000 mph (6,437 km/h) using a fraction of the energy an airliner uses – and recapturing a lot of that energy upon deceleration. Ultra-fast, high efficiency ground transport is technologically within reach – so why isn't anybody building it?